The unburdening of my past

Taking the weight off

I finally realized just how important the last few months have been since moving to the Pacific-Northwest. During those few months I’ve been taking some mental weight off my shoulders, loosening up a bit in norms. I’m no longer bound by the past self having set rigid standards and interactions. I’m more confident in showing a bit more of me in public and diving into new things.

My mind has been considering new ideas and new adventures that past self wouldn’t have even considered. Something about not being in my past self’s area or in a strict work-sleep-volunteer routine has set me free.

Summer to-do list

I’ve been compiling a to-do list or otherwise known as a “bucket list” for the summer. It’s just an assortment of things I really want to do or take a stab at. Anyway here’s my list currently:

• participate in an archaeological excavation/dig
• go outdoor bouldering
• hike or explore Mount St. Helens
• get a cool tattoo (thinking a floral thing like lavender, or geology related)
• start using a bike more often
• visit potential graduate schools (Lund University, Science Po, and University of St. Gallen)
• brew some mead
• make some cheese
• make pickles
• make and sustain a gluten-free sourdough starter

Some catch-up

So yeah, I’ve been fairly busy with going outdoors hiking, climbing, and also getting some archaeology training in. Unfortunately that meant less posts, but I did set the expectation of varying posting frequencies right from the beginning.

I bought a trowel to at least have that handy should I be able to get onto an archaeological excavation/dig. I’m quite happy with the cute sheath and how good the trowel feels in my hand. Maybe it’s just natural?

At some point over a weekend I was terribly sick with some sort of stomach bug. It must be going around or something, but that wasn’t fun and I had to skip a couple climbing days. I’m still trying to regain my energy and strength, but I’m doing much better than over the weekend!

Recently I’ve been working on completely overhauling my media collection and archiving capability. Started to use this open-source software called “Photoprism” to index and organize my media from the past ten years. It’s been plenty useful and I hope my ever-growing ticking time bomb of a problem has been resolved. Ideally, I’d like to free myself from paying for Google One and just opt for local storage. That or create my own cloud server to access and back-up media.

Anyway that’s about it. I might go climbing early morning then skip rocks under the bridge by the ducks. Maybe even grab a delicious chocolate pastry!

With (actual) trowel and Polaroid photograph, Kathryn